Review: WYLD WOMAN, Southwark Playhouse

If you’re one of the lucky few to be seated on the stage during new one-hander Wyld Woman, you’ll be treated to a close-up of US writer-performer Isabel Renner acting out some of the worst sex you’ve ever seen (one particular metaphor about Covid tests sticks in the mind). You’ll also hear her delivering, to you personally, the kind of heartbreaking confessions usually only reserved for the closest of friends.

It's appropriate that the full title of the show is Wyld Woman: The Legend of Shy Girl, after its protagonist, a New York waitress suffering from crippling loneliness, but also a belief bordering on the delusional that love both platonic and romantic will one day find her. Sequestered in her pastel pink apartment, with only her roommate (loquacious and constantly shagging in the next room) to talk to, Shy Girl comes to rely on her imaginary friends – the audience.

The audience interaction element starts from the minute we enter the auditorium, when ushers hand out name tags so that Renner can address unsuspecting punters by name. This initially feels like an unnecessary gimmick, but eventually ends up bringing to London some of that rare viewer-creator intimacy characteristic of the Edinburgh Fringe (where Wyld Woman played in 2024).

The play’s predictably saccharine conclusion actually sticks the landing and becomes quite life-affirming, precisely because we’ve been made to feel like Shy Girl’s friends, invited into her mind, warts and all.

While occasionally Renner’s portrayal of Shy Girl does fall into lazy stereotypes of social anxiety, there’s undoubtedly a well-formed underlying character here, naively romantic yet somehow also wise beyond her limited experience. Amid all the hand wringing and ums and ahs, there’s some very astute writing about social isolation here. Asking herself why the tattooed, cigarette-wielding “legends” of her neighbourhood are so legendary, Shy Girl simply says that they “do what they want to do and don’t do what they don’t want to do”.

Where Wyld Woman really finds its footing, though, is when the action moves to the bedroom. The titular Wyld Woman is a woo-woo New Age sex therapist (who doesn’t really feature all that much for being the show’s title) who tries to convince Shy Girl that her “pussy is part Portuguese”. This is just one example of Renner’s knack for portraying initial sexual encounters in all their awkward glory while losing none of her surreal sense of humour; her “blowjob ballet” is another.

Elsewhere in the show, Renner manages to cover a great swathe of Shy Girl’s life, with frantic multiroling. Some of this is successful (a scene involving a six-year-old psychotherapist that borders on magic realism) and some of it is less so (Shy Girl’s colleague and on-off situationship Pinot, who sometimes feels like an amalgamation of several bad Hinge dates rather than a coherent character).

All this certainly shows Renner’s versatility as a writer and performer, but a lot of time is spent on establishing that Shy Girl is shy, and putting her in situations that exacerbate that shyness, without ever probing why she’s so shy. The surrealism of Shy Girl’s inner world and the painstaking realism of her social interactions are constantly at odds, and that’s probably part of the point, but the lack of any context for this highly original character leaves the show feeling disjointed.

Still, Shy Girl and the world she makes for herself, awkward and scary but still worthy of romantic daydreams, is vividly conjured in barely over an hour. With a little fleshing out and a couple of rounds of edits, this could be the introduction of a very compelling character indeed.

Read our guest blog from Isabel Renner here.

Wyld Woman plays at Southwark Playhouse until 15 November